You can find more information, photos and advice sheets on all the plants and recipes that we talk about in this podcast by heading to the links in the show notes or on our website at sarahavin.com.

There's good news for those who want to buy bulbs.

You can get 20% off all the ones that Alan listed as favourites.

It'll be detailed in the show notes, but you just need to enter the code

Alan SR, all uppercase, on the website, and you will get the discount.

Welcome to Grow Cook Eat Arrange, the podcast of me, Sarah Raven, and normally my friend Arthur Parkinson.

But today, I have the incredible honour of having the dearest, sweetest man, who is Alan Titchmarsh, who's been a good friend to me for ages, and he was here.

I saw him in the summer and I said, could I possibly persuade him to come on and talk on the podcast about his favorite varieties of tulip?

Alan, incredibly, incredibly welcome to the podcast.

Thank you.

And thank you so very much because I know you are one of the busiest people in the world.

And so it's utterly sweet of you to make this time to talk about your love of tulips.

It's a pleasure.

So why do you love tulips, Alan? Because I think there's some kind of sculptips. It's a pleasure. So, why do you love tulips, Alan?

Because I think there's some kind of sculptural purity to them.

And it seems impossible.

I mean, it seems pretty impossible with a large daffodil bob that you're going to get a bunch of narcissi out of the top, you know.

But when you look at a tulip bob, it's that much smaller, that much more

compact, and it's sort of entire in that outer casing. And you, I still have this amazing feeling

when I look at these small bulbs not much more than an inch and a half high, and you know what's

going to come out. And the thing is, you've had the snowdrops first, which were white,

then you have the daffodils which are mainly yellow, and then along comes the tulips saying,

...